[Interview] People will always judge you by your work : Max Aengevelt, Co-founder – myhomepage

In this article, we speak to Max Aengevelt, co-founder of UK based startup myhomepage. Here Max shares his thoughts about the company, it’s core offering as well as his insights on entrepreneurship.

Can you give a small background of you and your start-up and its founders?

My name is Max Aengevelt. I am one of the two co-founders of myhomepage. I am a recent graduate of European Business School of London; the other co-founder is Massimo Agostinelli who still attends EBSL. Massimo originally had the idea for myhomepage together with his younger brother when working on his Apple Macbook. The way your windows can be displayed all at the same time is something that really inspired Massimo. Why not be able to view the web like this? Myhomepage is a personalized homepage, online password manager and bookmarking service that users can use as a start page. We are particularly proud to have an auto login capability that allows you to automatically login into your websites. From the original idea of being an interactive start page, we have really grown to be a one stop shop to start your online browsing. Myhomepage is a personalized start page.

There are lots of other competitors. What do you see are your strengths and weaknesses compared to them and what the future is like for these services? What is the USP of myhomepage over competitors?

There are several players in this market and we have analysed every single one. Therefore we can say with confidence we have the most complete product. To begin with we are not a widget based news aggregator, nor are we a pure bookmarking website. We offer a lot of different features that make it safer and easier for the user to navigate the web. 70% of websites require a username and password to fully operate the site, myhomepage is place that lets you organize these websites and automatically access them through our auto login feature. I personally would not be able to use the web without the clarity myhomepage gives me. One of our main competitors or alternatives is browsers. Browsers also allow you to store and organise bookmarks as well as passwords which are two of our main features. However, unlike browsers we are online. This means, wherever you are you will be able access all your favourite bookmarks and logins at any time and from any computer using any browser. Also browsers are not a safe place to store your username and password, someone could steal or hack your computer. And unlike other password managers, you do not have to download anything or pay for it. We use a patent pending technology to safely encrypt your account and passwords.

Secondly, as mentioned before, we are well aware of our competitors and no other service offers all the features we offer in one place. There are competitors offering one or two of our features but no one else offers them all in one place. Furthermore, it is designed with a simple, clean layout. We have a lot of great features which make using the website fun – we use thumbnails to display bookmarks, have a unique auto login feature, have drag and drop functionality, bookmarks are organized by tagging, you can import bookmarks and you can easily email bookmarks to your friends. Adding up all these features, myhomepage is a product that stands out from the crowd! Furthermore, ‘myhomepage’ is a great name and brand and one that is you can easily relate to and most importantly trust.

There are 3 people who commonly fund start-ups 3F’s Friends, Family or Fools; so who gave you the first set of investment myhomepage?

Haha sounds familiar…. Our families, in particular our mothers, who believed in the project from the start but we have also invested a lot of our own money and the last twelve months of our life into this venture. Currently we are in the market to get the next stage of investment from institutional investors.

What is your revenue model?

We have a few different revenue model options. Firstly, there is advertising. We can offer highly targeted ads as we naturally have a lot of statistics about user habits when using the Internet. Advertisers will be able to accurately target users interested in very specific markets. And as the ads are target accurately, users are more likely to click them and so we will have higher CTR and will be able to charge a higher CPC. We are also engaged with an application developer to create a smart phone/device application for myhomepage.

Both of you attended European Business School; could you please tell us about it and what you studied?

ESBL is a prestigious business school in London that has an international student body, which is great as it allows you to interact and become friends with people from all over the world. I have received my BA in Business Management with a Finance major; Massimo is still enrolled in the same course.

What are the major challenges that young entrepreneurs face?

It’s great being an entrepreneur. This is what we always dreamed of. Obviously start ups are very difficult and involves many challenges which often require us to multitask. It’s important to keep motivated and always push for the best every single day. Being young makes no difference, people will always judge you by your work.

If you have any questions for Max, please send them to himanshu.sheth@gmail.com & we would include the same in our article.